1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to exercise devices, and more specifically to exercise devices that offer the user rehabilitative and therapeutic effects. Magnets embedded into a device worn by an individual are believed to provide a therapeutic effect to the wearer and thus embedding magnets into an exercise device is believed to provide a synergistic exercise device, which provides a rehabilitative component and an additional resistive force to the exercise device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Regular exercise is considered essential for a person's individual health and well being. It is believed to provide life-long benefits. Many types of mechanical devices and apparatuses have been developed for the purposes of allowing the individual to exercise one or more parts of his/her body to promote muscle strength, tone, flexibility, and the like. Three such devices are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,626,545, 5,713,822, and 6,013,015 of which I am the co-inventor, the teachings of which are expressly incorporated herein by reference. These devices, like many, provide a resistance force which the user is intended to overcome by flexing/extending (or abducting/adducting) one or more muscles and/or muscle groups. Typical exercise devices found in the home or in professional-like exercise locations, namely, gyms, spas, work-out rooms, etc. use weights, a weight and pulley system, flexible rubber-like bands, and/or spring mechanisms, all for generating resistive forces. Other devices exist, too. The user is meant to overcome these forces in a repetitive fashion, i.e., by doing “sets” or repetitions of overcoming the resistant forces, thereby building up the quality, tone, flexibility, strength, etc. of his or her muscles and/or muscle groups. However, such devices can be considered limited in scope, in that they generally have, for each repetition or set, a predetermined and fixed amount of resistance for the user to overcome. For example, in the above mentioned U.S. patents, the devices all use resilient devices such as compression springs or elastic-like cords that provide limited amounts if any in variation of the resistance force required to be overcome by the user in a repetition cycle. The present invention provides an exercise device which uses the magnetic flux and attractive or repulsive forces between magnets (or between a magnet and a piece of ferro-magnetic material) as a mechanism to both provide a variation in the resistance force to be overcome during a set or repetition of the exercise device and, at the same time, provide the therapeutic effect considered to be provided by magnets, when the magnetic field comes into contact with the user's body. Additionally, exercise devices are frequently used to rehabilitate and/or revive injured tissue.
Unrelatedly, it has been discovered that magnetic fields have a therapeutic effect on living tissue; specifically, when an injured tissue is placed within a magnetic field, preferably a field from a north pole of a magnet, the healing process is believed to be enhanced, even accelerated.
Although exercise devices and magnets have both been individually employed to rehabilitate tissue and promote general well being, there is a long felt need for the combined use of both of these therapeutic methods at substantially the same time in a single device.